Facebook’s location feature expected to launch next month

Location-based postings may soon come to Facebook: the latest buzz says the …

Facebook is allegedly planning to roll out location sharing capabilities next month, once again playing catch-up to other services that have gained popularity thanks to location data. The rumor comes courtesy of anonymous sources who have been "briefed on the project" speaking to the New York Times, who said that Facebook will announce the feature at Facebook's annual f8 conference in late April.

The company's plans for such a feature have not been entirely secret—Facebook hinted at location features when it updated its privacy policy in November. Like other postings made to Facebook, location information will only be made available to the people you decide to broadcast it to.

"When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post," reads the policy. "If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate."

The location features will come in the form of an API for third-party developers and from Facebook, according to the Times' sources.

The feature will undoubtedly be popular among many of Facebook's 400 million users, as it has already proven itself with other services. For example, Twitter added geolocation to its API last year, not to mention that Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Latitude, and Loopt have all built their success solely upon the use of user location data. Needless to say, it's not something that will be new to the Web, though it probably will be new to a sizable chunk of Facebook's audience. Let's just hope the company rolls it out the right way, as implied by its privacy policy, and doesn't end up broadcasting everyone's locations to the world by default.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

That was my first thought... I deliberately AVOID making any location-dependent updates until after I'm back home from wherever it was. I don't want to give away to anyone that I'm away or out of town.

When you're afraid that your friends on facebook are scoping out your house just waiting for the right time to break in, then it's time to rethink your friending policy.

I'm not so concerned about myself, since I won't turn this entirely unnecessary crap on, but there are plenty of stupid people out there with 1000+ friends they've never met in real life who will use it constantly and without a second thought (or first, most likely). I wouldn't be at all surprised if it lead to a decent number of burglaries. I will really be tickled if some enterprising lawyer starts a class action lawsuit.

It's a bigger danger to turn it on at home and tell everyone exactly where you live. Do you trust all your friends with your data? What if even one of them gets hacked? Don't make yourself famous if you and the people you live with aren't ready for it!

Why do these social networking companies act so quickly to give people further options in being more transparent?

I think it stems from the idea that they're trying to bring people closer together over distances, or some such crap. I don't think they give care #1 about people's privacy, or their ability to distinguish when certain features could or should be safely used, or that lots of people wouldn't even know how to turn off such features if they even began to realize that it is not to their best benefit to use it. It's "business as usual". Their business is to try and connect as many people as possible to make as much money as possible off ad revenues.